Caleb let his head fall back against the rough rock wall. The crisis had passed but they still had to survive the night and get Danny back to Maiden’s Creek alive.

As the welcome, steady rain fell, Adelaide shivered and huddled closer against Caleb. ‘You didn’t finish your story,’ she said.

‘Which story?’

‘What happened after Maria died?’

‘Ah,’ Caleb said. ‘I left the ranch and drifted into San Francisco, where I made ends meet doing handyman work and gambling.’

‘But you could have been a doctor?’

Caleb shrugged. ‘I’d stopped thinking of myself as a doctor long before then. I’d endured the battles, the field surgery, but in the end Elmira broke me. Men were dying around me but there were no supplies, no anaesthetics, nothing. Nothing I could do. When they let me go, I went back to Virginia to visit my father’s grave. The farm had gone to some Northener. I swore then and there I was never going back and I headed west.’

Across the wide Missouri …

‘A new life?’ Her fingers tightened on his. An assurance that she understood, and he thought that she may well be the one person in the world who did appreciate what he had been through. Scarred by war, his faith in everything he believed in destroyed, it had not been a life, just an existence.

‘God alone knows I’ve done things I’m not proud of, Adelaide. I told you about Elmira. What I didn’t say was I stole food, and that is as low as you can get.’

He had told the guards he’d been stealing food for one of his patients. The truth had been far less palatable. He’d been stealing food to keep himself alive.

‘And if you’d died, what hope did the sick men in your care have?’

‘That’s never sat well with me, Adelaide.’ He took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Then there’s the matter of the man I killed in San Francisco.’

Adelaide’s fingers tightened on his. ‘You killed a man?’

‘The ghosts of those men I couldn’t save in Elmira had followed me west and I took to drinking and gambling to keep them away. Blood runs high after a night of drinking and I got into a game with a one-eyed soldier who’d fought for the North.’

‘How did you know he fought for the North?’

‘Damn Yankee still wore his hat, but he was no better than I. When I started to win, he called me a Dirty Johnny Reb. I accused him of being a deserter and he took offence at that and drew his gun on me. He got a shot off that missed me by half an inch and he would have fired again but I got in first, and I didn’t miss.’

‘It was self-defence,’ she said with such certainty that he laughed.